Debunking Hypocrisy about Immigrants in the Classroom

Native students perform worse in classes with immigrants. Study of primary two pupils shows headteachers place non-natives with children from less well-off families

Debunking Hypocrisy about Immigrants in the Classroom

Native students perform worse in classes with immigrants. Study of primary two pupils shows headteachers place non-natives with children from less well-off families

Sweeping issues under the carpet instead of experimenting objectively with the fastest, most effective integration strategies at school is of little benefit to immigrants or natives. A study this writer carried out with Rosario Ballatore and Margherita Fort (“The Tower of Babel in the Classroom”, www.andreaichino.it ) shows that if you replace a native student with an immigrant peer in a primary-two class, the proportion of INVALSI questions answered correctly by natives falls by 12% in Italian and 7% in mathematics (figures from 2009-10). The good news is that this tangible negative effect - comparable to having both parents unemployed or with secondary-school qualifications only - has disappeared by primary five. Italy's schools manage to integrate non-natives but only over the relatively long term, a timescale that absolutely must be shortened.

Astonishingly, the country takes sides. On the one hand are those who rail against immigration, forgetting that there are on average fewer than two non-native students per class and that only 6% of classes exceed the threshold of 30% immigrants, while others deny, or feel obliged to deny, that when even one non-native joins a class, there is no magic wand for instant integration. An impact on learning by other pupils is a possibility that is anything but remote. You risk being accused of racism if you suggest that it might not be a good idea to pitch immigrants into classes without guidance or that it might be better to follow the example of other countries and design a range of step-by-step integration strategies, to be applied according to individual situations.

The hypocritical impact of this side-taking is that headteachers, hoping perhaps to avoid ruffling feathers, place non-natives mainly in classes where native students' families are less well-educated and less well-off. It should be noted that this goes on within individual schools and not just among schools in different districts. The figures confirm this upsetting surprise. Non-natives at school end up in classes where parents are less likely to protest if their darling Pierino or Caterina is not learning very much because the kids at the next desk are called Wladi, Amina or Ramon. Officially, this is impossible because classes are formed randomly, which is equally ridiculous because it would be much better to set hypocrisy aside and form classes on the basis of available information about the students. But the worst possible, and ethically totally unacceptable, solution is to put natives and non-natives from the least favourable family backgrounds together.

I can hear headteachers and teachers asking: “What resources do we have to tackle this? What margin for manoeuvre does the ministry give us for diversifying course provisions to promote integration when it is needed?” And they are quite right. The leviathan education ministry, with its authorities, almost a million employees and tens of thousands of schools to look after, has neither the resources to tackle these problems nor up-to-date information on local conditions to decide where and how to intervene (hardly surprising when it can't even guarantee at the start of the school year that there will be enough teachers for all the classes). Above all, schools are not given full autonomy to manage their resources - human resources in particular - or to draw up their own course provision. Individual schools, which have a better knowledge of local immigration and other conditions, need this autonomy to solve the problems they have to face every day.

There is a way to trial state school autonomy, which Guido Tabellini and I described in the Corriere della Sera ebook Liberiamo la scuola [Let's Liberate Schools]. Our proposal imposes no solutions. Instead, we ask that those who wish to offer different educational provisions should be able to do so in a context that is regulated, experimental and evaluated by user choice.